The Google Earth Time Machine

A great feature and really useful in teaching about changes at the coastline.

Google Earth Blog
December 28, 2012 8:32 AM
by Google Earth Blog

The Google Earth Time Machine

One of my favorite features of Google Earth is the historical imagery tool. Being able to click a button and view imagery from years past is an amazing. If you're not familiar with this feature, here's a quick overview of how it works:

Taking advantage of this feature, Brian Schrock has set up a blog called the Google Earth Time Machine, which shows comparisons of various locations via the historical imagery tool. A great example are the two images below, which show the results of when a dam was placed on the Berg River in South Africa.

He's also posted some animations that make it easy to see the changes to a particular area. A great example of that is London as they prepared for the 2012 Olympic Games. This image shows the area in 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2012:

Brian has posted dozens of examples over the past few years, and it's worth your time to check them out at googleearthtimemachine.blogspot.com.

(via +Google Earth Community)

Sightseeing

Dr. Art Trembanis

Associate Professor

CSHEL

109 Penny Hall

Department of Geological Sciences

The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment

University of Delaware

Newark DE 19716

http://cshel.geology.udel.edu

302-831-2498

"We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

-T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

"Il faut aller voir" -JYC

OpenROV kit arrived

Today I went by the office and found a pleasant gift from Kris Kringle in the arrival of our OpenROV kit.

Serial number 122 from the first production run.

I will be documenting the build and test effort. For now I am reading through the build instructions on the wiki.openrov.com website, a quite unusual process for me I'm actually going to read through and follow the directions instead of just plunging headlong into the build. This will allow me to better review and comment on the instructions to help others along the way.

Already starting to think about payloads like the gopro camera and ctd we used on the OpenROV at Conch Reef.


Onwards and downwards.

Thanks Eric and David on putting a nicely packed kit together.

Researchers Studying 'Fingerprint' Left on Seafloor by Hurricane Sandy - OutdoorHub.com

http://www.outdoorhub.com/news/researchers-studying-fingerprint-left-on-seafloor-by-hurricane-sandy/


Sent from my iPhone

Seadiscovery.com - NCS Survey Expands in Aberdeen

http://www.seadiscovery.com/mtStories.aspx?ShowStrory=1083862121

Steve Jobs' Superyacht Impounded in Payment Dispute | Autopia | Wired.com

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/12/steve-jobs-yacht-impounded/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Top+Stories%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher


Dr. Art Trembanis
Associate Professor
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
http://cshel.geology.udel.edu
302-831-2498
"We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
-T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

"Il faut aller voir" -JYC

Real World Code Sucks

Amen and guilty

Slashdot
December 21, 2012 5:15 PM
by Soulskill

Real World Code Sucks

An anonymous reader tips an article at El Reg about the disparity between the code you learn at school and the code you see at work. Quoting: "There is a kind of cognitive dissonance in most people who've moved from the academic study of computer science to a job as a real-world software developer. The conflict lies in the fact that, whereas nearly every sample program in every textbook is a perfect and well-thought-out specimen, virtually no software out in the wild is, and this is rarely acknowledged. To be precise: a tremendous amount of source code written for real applications is not merely less perfect than the simple examples seen in school — it's outright terrible by any number of measures."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

programming

Dr. Art Trembanis

Associate Professor

CSHEL

109 Penny Hall

Department of Geological Sciences

The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment

University of Delaware

Newark DE 19716

http://cshel.geology.udel.edu

302-831-2498

"We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

-T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

"Il faut aller voir" -JYC

Lego Mindstorms Telepresence Robot

MAKE
December 21, 2012 12:30 PM
by John Baichtal

Lego Mindstorms Telepresence Robot

Ricky's telepresence robot consists of a Mindstorms robot hauling around a Skype-enabled tablet. The robot is controlled by a color sensor which detects color-coded commands on the tablet's screen and navigates accordingly. [via The NXT Step]Filed under: LEGO, Mobile

Read the full article on MAKE

LEGO Mobile

Dr. Art Trembanis

Associate Professor

CSHEL

109 Penny Hall

Department of Geological Sciences

The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment

University of Delaware

Newark DE 19716

http://cshel.geology.udel.edu

302-831-2498

"We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

-T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

"Il faut aller voir" -JYC

UD camera system records sea ice, identifies ideal walrus habitats

http://www.udel.edu/udaily/2013/dec/walrus-arctic-ice-121412.html


Sent from my iPhone

Drilling Begins At Lake Hidden Beneath Antarctic

Slashdot
December 13, 2012 5:49 PM
by timothy

Drilling Begins At Lake Hidden Beneath Antarctic

New submitter stonetony writes with this excerpt from the BBC: "A team of 12 scientists and engineers has begun work at remote Lake Ellsworth. They are using a high-pressure hose and sterilised water at near boiling point to blast a passage through more than two miles of ice. The aim is to analyse ice waters isolated for up to 500,000 years. The team of 12 scientists and engineers is using sterilised water at near boiling point to blast a passage through the ice to waters isolated for up to half a million years. The process of opening a bore-hole is expected to last five days and will be followed by a rapid sampling operation before the ice refreezes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

earth

Dr. Art Trembanis

Associate Professor

CSHEL

109 Penny Hall

Department of Geological Sciences

The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment

University of Delaware

Newark DE 19716

http://cshel.geology.udel.edu

302-831-2498

"We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

-T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

"Il faut aller voir" -JYC

River Seen on Saturn’s Moon Titan: 400-kilometer-long “mini-Nile” (Photo).

http://mobile.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2012/12/13/river_seen_on_saturn_s_moon_titan_400_kilometer_long_mini_nile_photo.html


Sent from my iPhone

FloodTools.com - Map My Risk

http://www.floodtools.com/Map.aspx

Oh the places we flew...

Finally getting around to posting the HD video from the post Sandy flights of the shoreline and realized I needed to pull up the GPS trackline data to be able to match up my annotations of the video locations to where it was taken on each flight.  Some day someone will have a nifty interface or add on to the GoPros to have embedded GPS but in the mean time here was my work flow.

1) Attach GoPro to outside window of Cessna...stare at camera (all GoPro videos seem to start with a variety of unflattering face shots usually aimed up the nasal cavity).

2) Give an audible note of the local time and for visual cue hold up watch or phone to the camera lens (see below).  Setting the date and time on the GoPros I find to be tedious and prone to error so unless I have a student there to help me I simply don't bother and just note the time whenever the camera comes on.

3) Turn on the camera and hop in the plane.

4) Fire up my phone to record the GPS track.  In my case I used the iOS applications GPX Master.  

http://www.rangdasoftware.com/GPX_Master.html

I like the ease of use and a specially nice feature is that it will sync to a Dropbox account so I had a preserved copy waiting for me on my laptop when I got home.

I used GPX because that is what Andy Coburn at the Program for the Study of Developed Shoreline http://www.wcu.edu/1037.asp

uses to match up the still camera photos that we take with the GPS positions which are then shared up on Picasa

https://picasaweb.google.com/psdspix

5) Convert the GPX files to kml.  In order to give myself something to work with in Google Earth I used this nifty online converter to upload my gpx files and spit out kml.  There are probably a myriad of other ways to do this but this one worked well for me.

http://gpx2kml.com

6) Fly...fly...fly

Below is a screen capture showing the tracklines of the two flights we conducted on 10/31 just after the storm.  We covered from Brigantine NJ to Cape May and along the DE Bay,the NJ side.  Then on the second flight we covered the DE bay shoreline and down along the MD and VA shoreline as far as Parramore Island.

7) process and upload the videos to YouTube.  I used Quicktime to open and trim the videos to 15 minute segments and upload to YouTube.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYXILrgVAas

High-End Submersible Brings Luxury to a New Low | Autopia | Wired.com

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/12/c-explorer-5/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+wired/index+(Wired:+Top+Stories)


Sent from my iPhone

The making of the "Powers of Ten"

The making of the "Powers of Ten"

Google Earth Blog

We've discussed the groundbreaking "Powers of Ten" film here on GEB a few times. Created 35 years ago by Charles and Ray Eames, it was an amazing film that showed the size of our universe from the very largest to the very smallest scales. Here's the nine minute film for those that haven't seen it before:

Slate recently took a look behind the scenes of the film with some great insights into it. While assembling a video like that would still take a good bit of work today, it was amazingly painstaking 35 years ago. Simply capturing the imagery was quite an undertaking, as explained by Alex Funke:

"We contacted the Chicago Aerial Survey and commissioned a series of three large-scale photographs to be taken on a sunny day," Funke explains. "For the widest shot, they went up in a pressurized high-altitude plane, a Cessna, which was really high. Later at the office we received the images on Ektachrome positive film, captured with these gigantic aerial mapping cameras

Once captured, here's how they pulled it together:

Next came the challenge of shooting the still photographs with a motion-picture camera in a way that conveyed constant acceleration. The solution was ingenious. They opened on a close-up of a 3-inch photograph of the picnickers on the grass, which had been carefully glued into the center of a 30-inch photo that showed a much wider view of Chicago at the next "power." The camera then tracks back from the 3-inch photo until the edge of the larger 30-inch photo is reached. Cut. The 30-inch photo was then shrunk down to 3 inches, placed into the center of the next "power" and the process repeated itself until the last link in the chain--1024, the image representing the distance of 100 million light years--was reached.

It's quite an amazing article and I encourage you to go read it.

You can also explore the Powers of Ten via this KMZ file that Richard Treves created a while back.

Not only can you experience part of the "Powers of Ten" in Google Earth, but the film was part of the inspiration for the original Keyhole project that later became Google Earth!

Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GoogleEarthBlog/~3/efFvTPAmrPU/the_making_of_the_powers_of_ten.html

Sent from my iPhone

Swimming Robot Reaches Australia After Record-Breaking Trip

Swimming Robot Reaches Australia After Record-Breaking Trip

Slashdot

SternisheFan writes "A self-controlled swimming robot has completed a journey from San Francisco to Australia. The record-breaking 9,000 nautical mile (16,668km) trip took the PacX Wave Glider just over a year to achieve. Liquid Robotics, the US company behind the project, collected data about the Pacific Ocean's temperature, salinity and ecosystem from the drone. The company said its success demonstrated that such technology could 'survive the high seas.' The robot is called Papa Mau in honor of the late Micronesian navigator Pius 'Mau' Piailug, who had a reputation for finding ways to navigate the seas without using traditional equipment. 'During Papa Mau's journey, [it] weathered gale-force storms, fended off sharks, spent more than 365 days at sea, skirted around the Great Barrier Reef, and finally battled and surfed the east Australian current to reach his final destination in Hervey Bay, near Bundaberg, Queensland,' the company said in a statement. Some of the data it gathered about the abundance of phytoplankton -plant-like organisms that convert carbon dioxide into oxygen and provide food for other sea life -could already be monitored by satellite. However, the company suggested that its equipment offered more detail, providing a useful tool for climate model scientists."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original Article: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/9Vd7a_DvkE8/story01.htm

Sent from my iPhone